Austen Saunders sings the praises of High School Musical’s high drama

I must admit, High School Musical is not a very good film. High School Musical 2 is a little worse and I have absolutely no doubt that the final part of the trilogy will be even poorer. The acting is weak, the plot risible, and the songs far from masterpieces, to say the least.

And yet, Troy and Gabriella, and most especially Sharpay and Ryan, I do love thee.

William Blake was very much of the opinion that Milton, whether he knew it or not, was on the side of the Devil when he wrote ‘Paradise Lost.’ I think much the same must have been true of the Disney Corporation when they channelled their many talents towards creating High School Musical.

The satanic force in East High is Sharpay, and she is every bit as charismatic and compelling as Milton’s anti-hero. After the naïve Gabriella knocks her off the school pecking order’s heavenly summit, she is desperate to seduce Troy away from his new sweetheart. She is a mischievous temptress driven by jealousy. She is fantastic.

If you love Sharpay, you will love High School Musical. She is the all-singing, all-dancing, malevolent heart of darkness which gives High School Musical its soul. If you ask me, she also gives it a sex-appeal the other teenage stars could only dream of, (It’s okay, she’s actually 23, I can say these things).

The Devil always has all the best tunes, and Sharpay knows how to make the most of them. The audition scenes in which she performs with her brother Ryan are breathtaking. Troy and Gabriella’s routines are exceedingly insipid.

Ryan is almost certainly gay, but he and his sister are very chummy. Forming as they do the counterpart couple to Troy and Gabriella, there is the slightest suggestion that family affection has been carried a bit too far.

Such suspicions can only add to Sharpay’s Byronic grandeur. Sharpay is a sequined force of destiny and if High School Musical had given the world nothing else, its place in the memory of man would be assured.

That, by the way, is no overstatement.

Sean Faye thinks HSM is out of tune with teens and families alike.

I should love High School Musical. The initial premise, involving an Alpha-male basketball captain who struggles to publicly admit his love for musical theatre, is certainly not wasted on me. When my 11-year-old sister encouraged me to watch the first film she sold it to me as a modern version of Grease.

Oh how deceptive this description was. On watching High School Musical, I discovered that the students of East High were in fact deranged antecedents of their 70s counterparts. Troy (Zac Efron) and Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) are an emotionally and sexually-stunted pair in comparison with John and Olivia; they don’t even kiss until the end of the second film!

With virtually no allusion to the trials and tribulations of adolescence, their singing and dancing is vacuous and inexpressive. Ridiculously, Troy hides his desire to sing and dance with his sweetheart by singing and dancing with his ‘macho’ friends.

My criticisms are drowned out by the chorus of pre-teens who have aided High School Musical in its rise from made-for-TV film to big screen phenomenon. If nothing else, High School Musical is a ruthless marketing machine, selling its teen stars and their manic smiles as heroes for children everywhere. In reality, they are closely managed, sterilised stereotypes: the ‘zany’ African-American friend, the ridiculous Paris Hiltonesque bitch with a stupid name (Sharpay? God help us) and her brother Ryan.

Ryan is perhaps the oddest figure in this group: a camp, pink beret-wearing dancer who, rather creepily, sings love songs with his own sister. It’s not like the all-American Disney channel were going to include an actual homosexual. Yet, they inexplicably decided to feature a desexualised, comical effeminate who, in High School Musical 2 suddenly took an interest in girls, largely due to the comments of reviewers in the series’ first outing.

Behind the scenes, there have been brief glimpses of the dishonesty of the High School Musical brand. Vanessa Hudgens’ chaste incarnation on camera was counterbalanced by real-life nudity… on camera. This is all in the context of her supposed relationship with foundation-wearing Zac Efron who, let’s just say, is probably more of a Ryan than a Troy in HSM terms.

The way that this relationship slowly falls apart with every passing moment of the High School Musical extravaganza just underlines the failure of High School Musical. HSM tries to inhabit an odd space between ‘family-friendly’ and ‘teen comedy’, and ultimately fails at both.

What is it like to be a bat? The is the question Jan Crombie poses at her new exhibition at OVADA. The first drawing evokes the strict lines and arches of neoclassicism, yet these lines have become mere mathematical facts, holding no importance.

The first few sketches (‘What is it like to be a bat? 1-5′) are barely there themselves – great circular heads are filled in with black so that they are literally cancelled out, vast cruciform shadows seem more present than the figures to which they attach themselves.

Jan Crombie is dealing with issues of identity. ‘Incorporating the Future’ shows a body painted from the leftovers of a landscape, unable to transcends its status as mere furniture. ‘Woman Who Knows Who She Is’ seems to be sinking through the canvas out of sight.

Yet this is not an exhibition wholly given over to heavy-handed statements – ‘What the Fuck is Bebo?’ is a collection of twenty-seven oil-on-board portraits, providing humorous touches alongside more sobering images. Equally, ‘A Suitable Tree’ shows a pair of cartoonish eyes attached to a man with wings, hanging upside down from a tree.

There is a certain amount of bathos in this response to the exhibition’s opening question – gone are the headless bodies and dominating shadows. What remains is an image of childlike enjoyment, with a sunflower yellow back wall further adding to the optimism of the piece. This is what it’s like to be a bat.

It is hard to say if this exhibition succeeds. Gone is the political clarity and novelty of Crombie’s earlier works, and it’s hard to define what she has replaced these with. It’s hard to know if there’s any palpable honesty to these pieces.

That’s not to say that this exhibition isn’t worth a visit (though the sight, outside, of the Oxford Tube beckoning me towards the delights of London was certainly tempting), just that the questions Crombie asks have been asked many times before.

Three stars

Husband and wife team Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have been collaborating for over a decade, representing Canada in the 2001 Venice Biennale culture festival. I wholeheartedly recommend seeing This House of Books has no Windows, their new exhibition. It is very much a fantasy world, far removed from the daily drudgery of our lives.

I was expecting the exhibition to be pretentious and over-serious, but it wasn’t. Designed to make you think, the installations also have a theatrical impact and a sense of humour that makes them enjoyable to see.

Cardiff and Bures Miller take inspiration from anything from Pretty Woman to modern rock music; the work of Samuel Beckett to the apparatus of capital punishment. Their use of multi-sensory techniques makes the exhibition into an interactive experience. In one installation, ‘The Dark Pool’, you enter a room within a room where discordant voices echo from gramophones activated by your movement.

Dim lighting, piles of books and clutter makes the room feel uncomfortably claustrophobic and other worldly. ‘The Killing Machine’ is a dental chair bizarrely covered in pink fur. Pressing a red button makes the chair begin a manic mechanical dance, accompanied by spinning lights and an eire soundtrack, which is not only visually spectacular but also politically provocative.

The whole exhibition is preoccupied with the idea of storytelling. Each piece submits the viewer to discordant voices which refuse to comply with one single interpretation.

Cardiff and Bures Miller challenge the observer to question their own sense of reality and the truth of the narrative of their life that they tell themselves and the stories told to us by others. Visiting This House of Books has no Windows is like being transported into a Tim Burton film set: a surreal combination of the sinister and the kitsch.

Four stars

Last week, Aravind Adiga won the Booker Prize for his first novel, The White Tiger, a ‘tale of two Indias’ that gives a damning assessment of the life offered by the author’s homeland to many of its inhabitants.

Adiga was born in Madras, raised in Australia, and had an education divided between Columbia University and our own dreaming spires. Yet having seen a good deal of the world, he has come back to his native India, both in life and in literature.

There seems to be something in the complexity and richness of the subcontinent’s culture that means Indian novelists are frequently predisposed not only to write novels set in India, but to write about India itself, and what it means to be Indian.

For some commentators, this has become cliché; lazy comparisons with Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie get trotted out with alarming regularity and the word ‘postcolonial’ hangs like a millstone around Indian writers’ necks.

Despite this faintly distasteful desire in the media to see all works emanating from this vibrant and diverse literary culture as cut from the same cloth, Indian writers were well represented on this year’s shortlist.

Amitav Ghosh was nominated alongside Adiga but most notably, Salman Rushdie was not. Does this mean that Rushdie, the godfather of the modern Indian-English novel has had his day, that the king has grown fat on his throne and is now to be usurped by the vigour of fresh blood?

In a word, no. Rushdie didn’t make the shortlist because the judges made a mistake.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with any of the books that were shortlisted, but the judges were simply in error when they decided that Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence was not one of the six best novels on the longlist.

In its scope and imagination it is far superior to Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency. In sheer quality of writing it outstrips Ghosh’s The Sea of Poppies. The Enchantress of Florence is not Rushdie’s best work, but it is comfortably better than some of the books that made the shortlist.

Rushdie can be, and too often is, a sloppy, self-indulgent writer. At his worst he creates impenetrable textual gloop that repels the reader with its obtuseness.

But Rushdie’s richness is also his greatest strength.
This literary conductor has so many instruments at his disposal that he can struggle to keep the whole ensemble in tune, but when he succeeds – as he does with The Enchantress – the results are peerless. Rushdie’s gifts give rise to grand, sweeping, complex books, and that’s why he’s been punished by this year’s Booker panel.

He didn’t write a bad book, he wrote what was deemed the wrong kind of book. Announcing the shortlist, Michael Portillo hailed six ‘fine page-turning stories.’ That phrase seems faint praise for a sextet of books that supposedly represent the very best in contemporary fiction.

Whilst some of the finest works of literature in existence are certainly those that are ‘both ambitious and approachable,’ in light of Rushdie’s failure to make the shortlist Portillo’s comment suggests a book that could be read quickly is more praiseworthy than one that demands to be read carefully, deeply and at length.

Snobbery must be guarded against; a judging panel favouring only dense and difficult books would be just as limiting as this year’s committee. Where should we draw the line though? This year, the ‘intensely’ readable novel is voted in, rendering it worthy of a kind of positive discrimination, while a more difficult but potentially more rewarding novel has been left out.

There should be a difference between the remit of the Booker Prize and that of Richard and Judy’s Book Club. The six shortlisted novels this year ranged from fairly good to excellent, some despite, some because of their page-turning style.

I would never want to suggest that a particular type of book is unworthy of the shortlist. This year’s judges, however, have done just that.

1984 was a vintage year: the birth of Band-Aid, the Crack Epidemic and Gareth Gates. In spite of these atrocities, Orwell’s future of mass rallies, endemic substance abuse and crass entertainment never came to pass.

Orwell, like populist polemicists from Guy Fawkes to George Galloway, has a talent for oversimplification that insults his readers and Stalinists everywhere. Animal Farm is a shining example; it could easily be dubbed the Dummy’s Guide to Socialist Politics.

Orwell tries to prove a basic point, but only succeeds in demonstrating his own supreme arrogance when he claims to provide a complex allegory of Communism via a fable about a horse that gets turned into some glue. You could learn more about the Soviet Union from Emmerdale Farm.

If this wasn’t cringe-worthy enough, Orwell plumbed new depths with Nineteen Eighty-Four, wherein he predicted a beautiful future in which novels, yes, even the novels of George Orwell, didn’t exist. Talk about flogging a dead horse.

The depressing thing about Nineteen Eighty-Four is it thinks it’s so much cleverer than Animal Farm; in fact its heavy-handed and overblown symbolism makes Animal Farm look like Proust.

It’s all in the subtle irony of Orwell’s embarrassing literary incompetence, all mouthy concept and no substantial trousers. The Big Brother concept has become a lazy shorthand for pseudo-intellectuals from Paul Merton to Radiohead. It is testament to Orwell’s shallow idealism that he created a world which is so vulnerable to extreme misappropriation.

Orwell’s style is masturbatory at best. Why must we endure reading about two under-sexed faux-revolutionaries who are merely a figment of Orwell’s wet dream?

If there is one thing worse than misguided Socialism, its half-hearted Freudianism. It’s almost as if Orwell was prophesying the concept of a GCSE set text. He should have taken a lesson from the Proles, rather than trying to compensate for his sexual shortcomings by torturing us relentlessly with his limp and ineffectual prose.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is sixth-form socialism at its best. Like many adolescents, George Orwell couldn’t even grow a real moustache so how could he ever hope to write a real novel? Come on; he looks like a poor man’s Michael Palin.

Narsinh Mehta, or Narasainyo, is the first poet of the Gujarati people. He fell from orthodox favour because of his celebration of sexuality, blindness to caste, irreverant musicality (apparently he never stopped singing) and the humanist devotional quality of his poems.

In July I saw the Sarvanaam (‘Pro-noun’) group at the Prithvi theatre revive the story of his life: Jaagine Joun To: Narasainyo. Presenting itself initially in a bare and silent space with nothing but three instruments of classical devotional song, it looked like a Gujarati sangeet was about to begin; only, I was told, the sivalingam, the Shiva phallus, was missing.

The saint’s life was not flatly eulogised, far from it: the story was dominated by dancing, games, and a trenchantly feminist domestic scene. A mesmerising shower of petals fell upon the elderly lead, and he received them like a clown rather than a saint.

The musicians weren’t merely backing the storytellers, but were allowing the life and theme tunes of Lord Krisna to become Narasainyo’s. The Sarvanaam approach was making God into the man, a considerable cultural counter-current.

The Prithvi (‘earth‘) complex in Juhu is a non-profit trust that shows plays in six languages in a tall but intimate theatre with a blacked-out thrust stage that also hosts workshops and drama festivals for kids. It provides artistically minded Mumbaikers with a trendy café in which to waft around ideas and opinions.

Launched in 1978 as a reaction to a dull theatre scene limited to “highbrow English, lewd Gujarati, or fusty Marathi” drama, the founders of Prithvi pioneered theatre on its own terms, for its own sake.

Working with unconventional and challenging practitioners, they refused to indulge commercial or pretentiously experimental productions. Despite having risen to the stellar heights of Mumbai’s artistic scene, they still have not forsaken Prithvi’s social conscience.

The vision, in all instances, is social, unpretentious and enlivening for all communities of many tongues. During the Jaagine I saw, everyone rose to join in a spontaneous dandiya raas, the stick-hitting dance. Rules about gender, tempo, and circling directions failed to feature; godly joy did.

It was the cheeriest eruption of spect-acting I’ve ever seen, and somehow I didn’t feel linguistically or culturally excluded.

The place: Burnley, East Lancashire. The tagline: an incestuous love triangle between two brothers and their step-sister.

Helen McCabe’s original new script, The Last Train Out Of Here, is an exploration of familial conflict and the intricacies of love, climaxing in an emotional confrontation which forces two brothers to face their deepest insecurities in one life-altering encounter.

Protagonist Rob (Andrew Bottomley) is in love with his step-sister, Nikki (Prudence Cauley). Nikki, however, has similar feelings for Sam (Tom Bishop), Rob’s younger brother.

Rob, unsurprisingly, doesn’t take kindly to the revelation, and the play ends in a dramatic scene between the suicidal Rob and his consoling brother Sam at the edge of the eponymous train-tracks.

A compelling plot, but was this conveyed in the acting? Regrettably, nothing can be said for Prudence Cauley’s portrayal of Nikki. In a rather awkwardly staged performance of a scene from Act Two, Cauley’s weakness was accentuated by Bishop’s convincing, if not entirely likeable, character.

Bottomley’s Rob, on the other hand, was a thoroughly unattractive and uninspiring figure. The emotional fervour of a teenager who has just attempted suicide was undetectable, replaced by whiny vocal expression, which made it difficult to get a sense of potential variation.

Admittedly, the actors were asked to perform the climactic scene without any emotional buildup, but nonetheless it was less of a peak and more of a fizzling out.

A moment of redemption came at the close of the scene, in which the two brothers departed from the awkward realms of masculine displays of affection for a moment of light-hearted banter, revealing the respective talents of both actors more genially.

Nevertheless, credit should be given to McCabe’s script, which provides for a thought-provoking theatrical experience, despite the marginally forced nature of its practical realisation.

Three stars

Take a cast of two, a boy and a girl. Put them together on a stage and make them sing sweet nothings and bitter remonstrations at each other for eighty minutes, without an interval. The result – a romance so sickly my eyeballs almost melted into syrup.

The Last Five Years is a series of vignettes showing the extended relationship between successful writer Jamie Wellerstein (James Leveson) and struggling actress Cathy Hiatt (Alice Gimblett), a pair of New Yorkers.

The story is about as interesting as a sub-standard Sex and the City plot, only without the sex. The gimmick is that her story begins at the end of their relationship, and his begins on the day they met.

Eventually the pair reverse roles, the stories intersecting on their wedding day half way through. Frustratingly this is the only duet in the show and highlights the plot’s dramatic thinness.

For a show supposedly about love, there isn’t much to feel good about, or to watch. When Cathy sings ‘I want you, and you, and nothing but you’ it’s difficult to appreciate why as her husband stands there mugging inanely and shuffling along. The Sondheim-esque piano-led songs range from jaunty to downbeat but are distinctly unmemorable.

James Leveson has a good voice, and grew more audible as the play progressed, but slurred an American accent he clearly isn’t confident with. Some direction that matched blocking to lyrics might have helped: why he sang ‘I wouldn’t be standing here now’ while marching directly away from his beloved I couldn’t fathom.

Alice Gimblett is the show’s saving grace, her rich and textured soprano emotionally resonant with a tender sweetness. With ‘I can do better than that’ she really came into her role, a vivid excitement about their future plans supplementing some beautiful voice ornamentation.

But Gimblett’s burgeoning talent alone may not be quite enough to justify the ticket price, considering the play’s dull story and lack of dramatic direction.

Two stars

I must say, All Roads Lead To Rome is an appropriate title. If, that is, Rome has recently become a synonym for bed.

Erotically charged from start to finish, this combination of Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra is an interesting take on Shakespeare’s classic romances. Fused together into one piece, All Roads Lead To Rome focuses upon the intricacies of the relationships at the heart of each play.

The potential of the concept was revealed at the end of the preview, when we were subject to an intense realisation of the last day in the lives of the two pairs of lovers. The simultaneously occuring images of Cleopatra tenderly dressing Antony for battle and Juliet’s pleading speech – ‘It was the nightingale and not the lark’ – was exceptionally beautiful and built to a conclusion laden with pathos.

Such effective use of montage was undermined, however, by the lack of chemistry between Alex Bowles’ Antony and Ellen Buddle’s Cleopatra.

Supposed to be a passionate love affair reflective of the towering stature of both leaders, Buddle’s Cleopatra was less a powerful feminist queen than a nervous housewife, whilst the relationship seemed insipid and forced. Bowles was visibly uncomfortable touching Buddle’s body, his hips hovering several centrimetres away from hers.

Quite the opposite approach was taken by Matt Maltby and Charlotte Norris’ Romeo and Juliet, whose performances were effective renditions that oozed with sexual tension. Romeo’s infamous line – ‘Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?’ – is suddenly more understandable when we have witnessed the passionate panting which seems to be Norris’ definitive character motif.

The balcony scene, that endearing moment of innocent young love, has become, in the directorial grasp of Will Maynard, practically soft porn. Indeed, his ‘vision‘ was decidedly nebulous, the only consistent aim being, it seemed, to fill the room with as many pheromones as was humanly possible.

I am, however, being pedantic. On reflection, the play was pleasing, innovative and enagaging. Despite having been rehearsing for only a week and a half whilst suffering from Fresher’s Flu, the cast were tight on lines, metre, and expression.

Special mention must undoubtedly go to Bowles, who gave a passionate and truly mesmerising performance as the leader torn apart by the inadvertent sacrifice of his own men.

I struggled with deciding what rating to give this show. Pushing the boundaries can be exhilarating, but injecting this most adored of romances with a good dose of eroticism is something of a risk. With a little more thought and lot more Lemsip, though, it could prove to be one which pays off.

3 stars

It only takes five minutes of navigating the tangled, unsettlingly invasive world of MySpace to see that musicians have a problem with categorization. For evidence of this, one quick search reveals a number of bands that have carefully defined themselves as ‘other/other/other’ a genre which I can only assume involves no instruments, no vocals, and a creative selection of farmyard noises and Windows 95 samples.

Most musical genres are entirely a creation of journalists, record labels and occasionally artists who want to feel original – The Klaxons and the short-lived ‘nu-rave’ being a good example. This phenomenon is never more obvious the case than in the case of ‘Intelligent Dance Music’.

IDM was invented as a label by the creators of an online mailing list to describe the 90’s output of the pioneering Warp and other record labels who shared the same view that dance and electronic music could be as ‘at home in the living room as on the dancefloor’. With this ethos in mind, artists such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher and Boards of Canada produced experimental electronic music that veered from laidback ambient techno to drum ‘n’ bass whilst slaloming effortlessly through musique concrète, obscure synthesised sounds and slavish attention to detail.

Unfortunately, it quickly became clear what a divisive term IDM would prove to be. While the IDM community was certainly influential, stretching its tendrils out into the mainstream in the form of Radiohead’s Kid A and Aphex’s Windowlicker, even at Warp’s primitive beginnings in Sheffield many found the idea of relative ‘intelligence’ between bands unpalatable.

Aphex Twin, having to an extent started the whole movement, also became one of the first to publicly disown the term IDM, denouncing its implication that other dance music was somehow ‘stupid’. Soon the term became taboo as record companies and artists alike scrambled their musical thesauruses to find another, inoffensive, way of describing their music.

Many suggestions followed, more amusing examples being ‘electronic body music’, or naturally ‘EBM’, and ‘armchair techno’, which seemed to suggest that one should listen to Squarepusher by a toasty fire with a purring cat on your lap. Of course, this would be impossible without strangling the cat and burning it in crazed ritual sacrifice, such is the intensity of Tom Jenkinson’s progressive jazz-infused brand of drum ‘n’ bass.

As it turned out, however, none of the artists ever really escaped the label and it remains a fitting way of describing the experimental attitude of many within the electronic music community. While IDM is without doubt a crude and offensive genre label, the bands it describes all have a healthy dose of this supposed ‘musical intelligence’, and it will allow them to remain relevant even as they are ostracized by the rest of the dance community and explore areas the mainstream will not dare to.